create-links-with is a turtle procedure that creates a link between the current turtle (self) to every member of a provided agentset. (compare with create-link-with, which creates a link from the current turtle to a single other turtle).

One important thing to keep in mind when using create-links-with is that a turtle creating a link to oneself will cause an error. For example, if you were to write:

ask turtles [
  create-links-with turtles in-radius 5
]

you would get an error, because the current "self" turtle would be included in turtles in-radius 5, causing a turtle to try to create a link with itself, which is not allowed. To avoid this issue, you will often see the command other used with create-turtles-with to ensure that no self-links are accidentally created. For example, to fix the above bug, you can instead write:

ask turtles [
  create-links-with other turtles in-radius 5
]

In this example, create-links-with is used to simulate contact tracing, wherein we track every pair of interacting individuals (in our case with a link) and then use that information to track down people who may have been exposed to an infectious illness. In our model, at each tick, every individual creates a link with all other individuals within a small radius of itself, representing a "contact". We can then use the trace back button to highlight every individual who has contacted a potentially infected individual by back tracking along those links.